Stone Circle The mother stone is what I become

Lyrics from 'Neglected Space' by Imogen Heap. RIP to the brightest queen <3 ;___;

He itched to leave. To travel long, and far, over the western mountains. To scale Moonspear again, and find Hydra, to escort warriors out east, that they might put an end to Ursus once and for all.

But mother had left, and so had West, and they had left him behind -- their failure of a son and a brother. He still tasted the blood of the cannibal he had killed in Fox's Glade... how many weeks ago now? And the dirt he'd clawed up to bury the youth that monster had killed. The clumps of earth still felt wedged between his claws.

Mother hadn't even approached him to watch the pack while she was gone, and that as much confirmed what she thought of him now: that she thought nothing much of him at all.

A has-been, a once was, the leftovers, an eyesore, bleeding, oxidising. 

But he came to her when she called. His heart still burned with love for her. Arlette and Keen, Leta, and Clay, and Newt, and Clary, and Ezra, and Steph, and Greyback, and Stark... West and mother, of all he'd sought to protect... they were the only ones left.

A few remaining, unloved, emotionally damaged, a waste of space.

He found Valette at Stone Circle. An uneasy tension cracked through the air. Merrit caught her eye, their bright hazel the only visible part of her he had ever carried -- and something was wrong.

Merrit paused at the cusp of the circle; brow knit; paw raised in a moment's hesitation to push forward and join her. Mother. His thoughts only warned in silence. He did not catch the smile that came across her complexion as his cousin joined them. Merrit turned his eyes to the stones to the sky. Ears tall, and flinching in every direction.

Unearthly silence.

And then, a great quaking, as one he remembered from many months before.

Cool stone met his shoulder, as the tallest stone of the Lost Souls upheld him, and in his mind he could see that memory of Greyback's body fallen to the ground, as though dead, when the earth had first shaken.

And he screamed, but his voice trickled out as a whisper.

"mother..."

What's gone? I'm losing it.
This is not what I stand for.

 The stone above her shook, with a violence he had never seen the earth shake before. Once a beacon, now a shadow of darkness, like the angel of death spiralling down, down, down to the earth --

This is not what I stand for.

"Mother." No. No. NO!

This is not what I stand for.

But his legs carried him over the trembling ground at the speed of a nightmare. He couldn't move fast enough -- he plunged for her --

"MOTHER."

Dust billowed in a cloud around him, choking through his lungs, stinging his eyes. He fell onto cold, crumbled stone.

And he knew.

"NO!"